Burlington gets yet another award - this one is a little dubious

opinionred 100x100By Blair Smith

March 19th, 2021

BURLINGTON, ON

 

A press release received today from PSD CITYWIDE announced “North America’ Top 20 Open Cities”.

PSD is a corporation with offices in Burlington that serves the municipal sector as consultants, advisors and software providers.

PSD graphic

The organization that gave the city the award published a lot of background material for the municipal sector.

Their award sounded  like something worth knowing about and certainly something worth celebrating. The ‘presser’ begins with “Today, PSD announces North America’s Most Open Cities with the City of Edmonton, Alberta maintaining their number one spot for the fifth consecutive time. Next, Ottawa, Ontario moves into the second place spot, with Winnipeg, Manitoba coming in third. All top 3 organizations achieved excellent scores and made great strides this year in all three competency categories.” According to the ranking, the City of Burlington is tied with the City of Coral Gables as the 9th Most Open city in North America.

On its face this appears to be a remarkable achievement and one certainly worthy of having a temporary primacy of place on the COB and/or Mayor’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and various other social media accounts. However, appearances (and awards) can be deceptive. First, just how many jurisdictions were included in the ‘competition’ and analysis? Remember there are over 400 municipalities in Ontario alone. How many more (or comparable governance bodies) across Canada; how many state and county organizations? The number must be well into the thousands. But, according to the press release, only 41 organizations across North America participated. Is the response then even statistically relevant?

Secondly, to implicitly associate Open Government with the survey’s three evaluation contexts for “open data” is perhaps both misleading and inaccurate.

Open data does not automatically equate with open information and most certainly does not, in itself, constitute open government – not even close. So, the sampling is statistically insignificant, the association perhaps misleading and the ranking virtually meaningless when you consider the sample size. Even so, how did the responding organizations do? How shining is their example? Well, the average score of the 41 was a completely miserable 34.9%. Burlington in the exalted 9th position was barely above 50%.

Really, this is hardly something worthy of a press release; if it does perhaps the banner should read “North America’s Top 20 Most Open Cities Are Still Closed Shops To Their Citizens”.

Blair Smith is a retired provincial civil servant who delegates frequently at city hall and has very strong views on both open data and open, transparent municipal government.

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